Following the publication of the Palgrave International Handbook of Marxism and Education, this session centred three international interventions, demonstrating how a range of contextualised Marxist analyses enable practitioners to engage with issues of international concern. The session offered space for researchers to discuss how these case studies might impact or be used in their own scholarship, research and praxis, through fresh perspectives and views that disrupt established positions in educational research, scholarship and practice.

The Palgrave International Handbook of Marxism and Education is an international and interdisciplinary volume, which provides a thorough and precise engagement with emergent developments in Marxist theory in both the global South and North. The case studies in the session were taken from different geographical and educational contexts, in order to show how social theory enables a rich historical and material understanding of education sectors and contexts, including in the following.

• The importance of Marx’s dialectical method in critiquing education.
• Transnational and national governance, regulation and funding of education.
• Histories and geographies of educational development and change, for instance in relation to corporate forms, the binaries of public/private education, issues of marketisation and commodification.
• The structures, cultures and practices of formal and informal educational organisations.
• The lived experiences of education by centring a range of intersectional analyses.
• The educational role of new social and political movements, like decolonising, indigenous rights, Black Lives Matter and Rhodes must Fall.
• The web of life and ecological readings of education.